The School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (SICE) CS Colloquium Series - Distinguished Speaker Series

Speaker: Tandy Warnow, Founder Professor of Computer Science and Associate Head of CS, University of Illinois, College of Engineering

Where: Luddy Hall, Rm. 1106, Dorsey Learning Hall

When: Friday, January 25, 2019, 3:00 pm

Topic: TBA

Biography: Tandy Warnow is the Founder Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also an affiliate in Mathematics, Statistics, Bioengineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Animal Biology, Entomology, and Plant Biology. Tandy received her PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley under the direction of Gene Lawler, and did postdoctoral training with Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman at USC. Her research combines computer science, statistics, and discrete mathematics, focusing on developing improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in biology and historical linguistics. She has published more than 160 papers and one textbook, graduated 11 PhD students, and has 5 current PhD students. She has been a visiting faculty member at many universities, including Princeton University, the University of Maryland, Yale University, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Harvard University. Her awards include the NSF Young Investigator Award (1994), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award (1996), a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2006), and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2011). She was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2015 and of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2017. Her national service includes being the lead NSF program officer for BigData (2012-2013), chairing the BioData Management and Analysis (BDMA) study section at NIH (2010-2012). Tandy was also a member of the Big Data Senior Steering Group of NITRD subcommittee of the National Technology Council (coordinating federal agencies), 2012-2013.